


picking up the remnants

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fluff, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Sburb, dave is sad and john is sadder, it started with one line of prose and a quote and i just wrote it up, this is honestly a mess, what am I even doing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 17:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7371379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em> come what come may</em><br/><em> time and the hour runs through the roughest day. </em><br/> </p><p>They've all been wounded; massive, ugly red cuts that will scar when they finally close up and none of them are sure if things will ever get better.</p><p>Dave watches his best friend dragging himself around every day, by the minute, and it hurts more than he's willing to admit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	picking up the remnants

**Author's Note:**

  * For [caryophyllaceae (xphantomhive)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xphantomhive/gifts).



> okay. No idea how the gifting system works but here, a bit less than 2k words of a little johndave drabble i've had sitting around for a while.  
> thank you for being nice to me? i was all 'holy shit wait i can't just let a person gift me and not gift them back!!' which is probably stupid and defeats the point of a 'gift' but i have two things i want to post so this one is for you.
> 
> you're very sweet. thank you.
> 
> -
> 
> hey. so the summary quote is obviously from macbeth which is great. I just had it written down from my english class studies and decided to write a fic starting with that quote, i guess. I've had the first two thirds of this sitting around for a while and decided to finish it, so here we are, I suppose.
> 
> Thank you for all you guys' support on the previous fic (the dirk-centric one), by the way. I'm very glad you're enjoying it.
> 
> I hope you enjoy this one, too.

-

-

-

They've all been wounded; massive, ugly red cuts that will scar when they finally close up and none of them are sure if things will ever get better.

He is Dave Strider, the boy with time stitched into his veins, the red he loves and despises so much throbbing through arteries and sliding through atriums and ventricles, laced with lives lost and regret, so much regret.

The Game has long since ended, and yet he is still (forever, it lasted for years and he doubts it will ever fade) in love with a tragic boy whose smiles are too wide, tissue paper skin stretched across aching bones, a boy who fingers out tunes on a piano without realising that every note he plays is a lament on its own. 

They are a broken pair on their own, red and blue shards of gods and children being held together by each other, and what a sight to behold: a pair of boys who never cry but have all the rights to in the world. Dave watches his best friend, day in and day out, and he never fails to notice every moment he hesitates (too many times), every second his face falls when he thinks no-one is looking (he's always looking), every word he doesn't say (all of the important ones).

He's not sure how much longer he can go on for.

 

The game called them heroes, but they aren't, not anymore.

The game called them gods, but they aren't, not anymore.

The game called them everything and nothing, because they were always doing things that they were never meant to do.

They were always just children, essentially prepubescent barely-teenagers holding entire universes within their tiny palms, four kids who should have been running around, making friends, playing games together and chatting. Living through their adolescence, not spending their entire teenage lives fighting.

(Dave realises with a pang of that they did all of that, except when they ran around, it was for their life. When they made friends, it was by necessity, and with a separate species of relatively bloodthirsty aliens who were the creators of their universe. When they played games together, they also brought about the destruction of their universe, and everything they had ever known. When they chatted, they talked of fighting, of strategies and suicide missions, anything to keep going, anything to win.)

They'd all had a childhood, in the Game, alright. But it was beyond the realms of traumatising; it was essentially borderline catastrophic, disastrous, highly fucked up, and even outsiders could recognise this, although not with any sense of understanding.

-

There was something imminently sad about his powers. Time travel was a terrifying thing; there were too many split-ends, branches of time shooting off into nowhere, threads tangled and snapped and fraying. It was really no wonder that he'd decided to quit.

He is (was) a Knight, a protector, forever going back and forth in his element, leaping between timestreams like water striders flitting about in a pond, but he was never a hero, and he's beginning to think that no-one else really was, either.

Things are getting better, slowly, since there's no more fighting left to do, but all of them were thrust into a world they'd built from the ground up, and it is always unfamiliar and overwhelming. They don't have the luxury of their guardians anymore, mostly.

It's a miracle, really, that Dave's treasured aviators are still completely intact, and he may have spent a third of his life wearing them, but he's not going to take them off anytime soon. If he did, people would see him watch, see his strength slowly chipping as he sees John carrying around his broken pieces as if everything is normal, will be the same again.

John will sit at a piano for hours, sometimes playing entire songs, but sometimes just lightly pressing off-white keys in a silent rhythm, a melody meant for his own ears only, and he'll slouch a little and stare at the notes and not notice the tears until they're running tracks down his face.

He'll step outside in the middle of a thunderstorm, and he'll outstretch his arms because he misses it, misses the feeling of the Breath in his lungs, wind pulsing through his blood and flight resting on his fingertips.

He never stays by himself anywhere, always with another person, or at least playing music or doing something involving noise, because everything reminds him of the Game- those hours and days spent in a quiet house on a platform in the middle of oblivion, where all the company he had was a whispering Sprite and some imps, and the only direction in which he could go was up. When there's nothing to make any noise for you, the silence surrounds everything and fills in all the gaps, and it's painful, because it reminds him exactly how alone he really was.

 

Dave notices too many things about his best friend, and it hurts. He's always had a knack for numbers, for keeping count of things and calculating figures quickly in his head. It's all too easy for him to recite them, the precise numbers of weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, every tiny increment he's seen John trying to glue the pieces of himself back together.

Nightmares are real. They're all too real, now, and even though everything has ended they have come to realise that they will never, ever forget any part of the Game. It will always linger.

The problem is, nightmares are scary, but they've always been dismissed because they're not real, or the chances of their horrors becoming real have always been realistically close to zero.

But their nightmares, the nightmares they all experience now, they're _real_. As real as every single Dave that died in a pool of blood, the scent of death, salty and metallic mingling with the smoke of his Land. As real as John's father's dead body, lying next to a stranger he acknowledges as Rose's mum, and a dark, looming figure with a sword in hand and one of his best friends with ashen skin and shadows seeping out from every orifice. As real as the feeling of blade slicing through flesh and metal as Dave cuts cleanly, dragging his sword through the necks of his brother and his two enemies.

So they're nightmares, but they're not.

They're memories.

 

The thing that hurts Dave the most, though, is that John doesn't just snap and cry his heart out. He hasn't seen him shed a single tear since everything ended, even though he still winces sometimes when he sees Jane's Dad, who has no memory of him. Even though he has nightmares just as frequently as the rest of them. And Dave, Dave can't help but think _really? haven't we been through enough? why, why do you think that you have to keep smiling for us?_

And then, everything ends.

They sleep next to each other, now, because it's always nicer to have a familiar heat close by when you wake up sweating and choking and feeling like death.

Dave still hasn't confessed, because things are still shaky and he's scared and he doesn't want to ruin anything--

He's still awake; he often doesn't manage to get to sleep until hours after John does, and tonight is not an exception. Their beds are close to each other, close enough for him to be able to quickly slide in next to him if he wakes up.

Not that he'd ever say that to his face, of course, but that was kind of the point when he'd suggested it.

His line of thought is completely obliterated when he notices John's breathing become uneven, ragged, and he's over next to his best friend in an instant as he opens his eyes and coughs a few times.

"Dave," he chokes out, and Dave is still iffy on the whole personal boundaries thing but he's pretty sure it's okay to hug your best friend.

Long, bony arms are wrapped around him, and John can only think about how warm he is, his side pressed into Dave's chest, and then things slowly unravel and for the first time since the game ended, he cries.

Dave is equal amounts of surprised, in pain, and relieved, because it's worse watching John bite his lip hard enough to bruise every time he's upset and seeing him suffer silently. Dave, for all of his whole stoic coolkid act (which he has essentially dropped around his friends since it's pretty much useless), has cried more than John has (though only once), after he'd spent a good three years realising that his view on emotions and what he's been holding back was skewed. _Really_ skewed.

And John, who has been literally by his side for essentially the entire time, has always bent down, rubbed circles into his back for a while, and helped him.

It was about time he let Dave return the favour. He doesn't ask what the nightmare was about, because he pretty much already knows what it could be, so he just holds him tight and crawls onto the bed so they can hug properly.

Eventually, he slows down a little, and Dave is bad with his words, bad at comforting people by telling them things, so he just says "First time I've seen you cry since everything ended." and fuck, that was not what he was supposed to say, but John nods.

"It's been hard, and I just. Everyone was sad around me, too, and I was supposed to be the friendleader, right? So I just--"

Dave cuts him off. "John, oh my god," his voice cracks a little and he hates it, "you don't have to keep smiling just because you're our leader. You have just as much of a right to emotion as the rest of us, and that's pretty rich coming from me, but I moved past that already."

John laughs a little. "I guess it does sound pretty pathetic, in retrospect."

"No kidding."

He's about to say more but John leans forward and cuts him off with a kiss, and he's warm and a little damp and it's short, but holy _fuck_ it's great. 

"Seriously? Cutting me off with a kiss? Wow, John, way to come up with a completely non-cliché way to confess your obviously undying love for me." says Dave, except it's kind of rushed and squashed together because he's slowly turning red as John grins.

"Yeah, yeah, well, at least it's not as cliché as the whole 'friend-zoned by your best bro' trope."

"... Damn straight."

John just laughs a little, letting out a tiny sigh.

"... John?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't feel like you have to hold it in, okay? Trust me, I spend years realising that and that shit helps."

"I got it. And Dave?"

"Mmhmm?"

"Thanks."

And the wounds they've all suffered from will scar, they already have, but they're healing, closing up and simply leaving pale, silvery lines as they hold each other together.

Things are getting better.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I like post-sburb things. was that obvious yet? coughs anyway  
> I really like the whole johndave hurt/comfort dynamic in that they can find mutual support within each other, and they're a lot easier for me to write than basically every other ship, even though i do like the canon dynamics of davekat too.
> 
> Everything I write is pretty Dave-centric, haha. It's the same with my drawings. When I finish a drawing, I'll link it in one of my fics, i guess.
> 
> ...hope you liked this mess of 'dave is sad and john is sadder' because it's my favourite thing to write. i think john needs to realise that he's as entitled to feeling sad as everyone else, especially since he's known to be happy and cheerful all the time and yeah.
> 
> on a side note, i don't know exactly how to characterise the people i write when they're so much older than me? like usually i write them between 17 and 21, and i'm 14 right now. how do adults think. in the end age means basically nothing to me at this point so.


End file.
